Changing drives in drive caddies

[Peter Cupitt]

I have recently aquired a Proliant 3092 storage array with 6 x 4.2Gb hard drives. The question is, can I obtain new (larger) drives and install them in the caddies I already have to increase my disk space. EG: install 9 or 18 Gb SCSI drives into the caddies which currently have 4.2Gb drives.
This is not mission critical as this is a self education and learning project.

[Christian Wessely]

As to my experience, it depends on the type of interface that is used in the caddies. I myself had a BAD surprise when buying 15 naked Seagate Cheetahs 4,3 GB to put them into the RZ28 Caddies ... they simply did not fit.
AFAIK there are three different types of interfaces in the caddies. So check which one you have before trying.
Basically, the answer is yes, you can. But you have to check your parts and to be aware that this is of course unsupported :o)

regards
CW

[Mike Bollman_1]

I've done it recently when HP sent me out a replacement SCSI drive, but was mounted in a FC caddie. No big deal at all. Also, years ago we would do this with the old beige wide-ultra drives with no ill effect.

As you said, what do you have to lose since it is a learning project.

[Terry Hutchings]

I would just recommend opening the tray and verify whether it has a 68 pin or and SCA interface. In either case you can do this, but you will need to know what interface is on the drives you currently have, in order to get the correct larger size drives.

[Steven Clementi]

Peter:


You may be able to find some replacement 9Gb drives, maybe even some 18's or 36's, but I would not be too optimistic to find anything past that. These drives were Wide Ultra, 40MB/s, or so I think. Can't seem to find anyy solid reference material on the PSS3092 as of yet.


Can you post a model number or spare part number for your current drives?


Steven

[Peter Cupitt]

Thanks guys, further info is drive trays are beige "low profile" Fast Wide ultra 2 and one part number on the trays seems to be JDT23015
or part number 242622-001. They are all 4.3 Gb now but I would like to put either 9 or 18 gb drives in if I can find them cheaply. The project is progressing pretty well for an amatuer (LAN, Pent 1 serv with ide, 7 scsi disk array, wireless and wired to pent 4 pent 3, AMD running Win 98se, Xp Home, Vector linux and Ubuntu linux) . All working (OK - a bit slow ) better than expected.
Any suggestions?